melanie bonajo’s Dutch Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale – RisePEI

For this 12 months’s Venice Biennale, the Netherlands lent its well-placed pavilion within the Giardini to Estonia, which doesn’t have a everlasting exhibition area within the metropolis. And so the Dutch are as an alternative utilizing the Chiesetta della Misericrodia, a deconsecrated Thirteenth-century church within the Cannaregio district to host a present by artist melanie bonajo. It’s titled “When the physique says Sure,” and it’s a memorable affair.

Kick off your sneakers, sprawl out on the brightly coloured, undulating seats that cowl the ground (a collaboration with artist Théo Demans), and savor a brand new video by bonajo, who works, per press supplies, as a “sexological bodyworker, somatic intercourse coach and educator, cuddle workshop facilitator and activist.”

Onscreen, for round half-hour, a dozen or extra genderqueer folks—steadily topless or bare—interact in freewheeling workshops about contact and consent. In a single part, they’re sure with tape, recalling the bondage-y photos which are in all probability bonajo’s best-known work; in others, they writhe, dance wildly, or simply lay collectively, all dealing with the identical path. They’re exemplars of intimacy, and after a pandemic that has stored so many aside, they’re mesmerizing.

In brief voiceovers, members speak about how the workshops have improved their lives, and the way they’ve discovered to like contact, in some instances following childhoods that featured little of it from relations. “A world with extra contact could be extra peaceable,” one muses. Think about the summary sensuality of Pipilotti Rist delivered by a constellation of lovely our bodies, accompanied by a little bit of instructional materials, and you’ve got a way of the ambiance.

This set up may in a short time be a part of that regrettable model of performance-inflected artwork the place the performers are having fun with their time an amazing deal greater than their viewers is, however bonajo’s collaborators are having a lot enjoyable—radiating such pleasure—that the buoyant temper is infectious. It carries you alongside. In essentially the most irresistible passages of the video, every particular person covers themselves with what seems to be olive oil, and takes a flip gliding over the others—a slow-motion Slip ‘N Slide manufactured from people. The gliders seem like in heaven.

All of that mentioned, in the event you desire your erotic-tinged artwork to return with some darkness, or simply to have extra selection, you’ll be able to stroll a couple of minutes to a different present within the neighborhood organized by the Los Angeles–based mostly Tom of Finland Foundation referred to as “All Collectively.” It consists of works from its assortment of LGBTQ+ artwork by dozens of artists, as effectively a powerful array of drawings by the grasp Tom of Finland himself. Many alternative types of contact—some involving leather-based and whips—abound. The Biennale, as all the time, has one thing to swimsuit each style.